How safe is “safe enough”?

1. Introduction

Synthetic biology is a way of engineering organisms that do not exist in nature, by simplifying the complexity of biological systems through abstraction using standard building blocks, called Biobricks. While creating an organism, the researchers and the students have to think twice whether their actions are safe for the environment and public.

In E.D. Frosti we added several mechanisms to ensure the biosafety. We thought about the dangers E.D. Frosti could entail and the impact it would have on the environment and even for mankind if something goes wrong. But the question remains: How safe is “safe enough”?

2. Safety in the lab

The Irish novelist S. Lover said:” It’s better to be safe than sorry”. While working in the lab, this is the key sentence that the K.U. Leuven iGEM team 2011 kept in mind. We are working in a laboratory with biosafety level 1 because the host organisms we use are non-infectious. Every student working in the laboratory attended and passed the course ‘ safety and laboratory practice .[1] We apply the standard rules of Good Laboratory Practices; we always wear a lab coat, lab glasses and if using chemicals or handling organisms, we wear gloves. In addition, a member of the safety institution of our university ‘Health – Safety – Environment’ (HSE) or the advisors are constantly present to guide, assist and help the students. We reported the project to our department by filling out the forms ‘risk assessment for experiment with hazardous biological materials’. In this form we considered the danger of working with genetically modified organisms.